Art Of Moving-very Carefully

July 14, 1995|By Jon Anderson, Tribune Staff Writer.

Trained couriers escorted some of them across the Atlantic. Teams of drivers, riding non-stop in trucks with special suspensions, drove others from Los Angeles. Before dawn, museum agents at O'Hare International Airport plucked another, in a huge caulked crate, off an inbound Northwest Airlines cargo flight.

Like a gathering of world leaders, the arrival in Chicago of a great many Monets-159 pieces by the French Impressionist artist, worth upward of $600 million-for the world's biggest-ever exhibit of his works has created some gigantic logistical challenges over the past two months.

Unlike with the average householder's shifting of favorite possessions, such as shipping mother's lacquered armoire from Tuscaloosa to Elk Grove Village, a Monet mover cannot say, "Oops, sorry" and move on to the chintz armchair.

Drop a corner of, say, "Water Lilies (Evening), 1920," a painting from the Kunsthaus Museum in Zurich which is 10 feet long by 7 feet high, and you will be condemned, among other penalties, to Art History Hell forever.

Lose track of your luggage after flying across the pond with "Study of Rocks, The Creuse, 1889"? Try going back to London and explaining that to your boss, its owner, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

It's one of her favorites.

For security reasons, mum's the word among officials at the Art Institute of Chicago when it comes to talking about how specific paintings got here-or plan to get home. But in interviews with staffers, it is clear that many in the museum's offices are exhaling quiet sighs of relief and engaging in discreet back-patting.

The inbound part of "Claude Monet: 1840-1926" came off "without," as they say, "incident."

The last two paintings arrived early Tuesday from Japan, air freighted from a show in Tokyo that closed last weekend.

The show, to be seen only in Chicago, opens to the public July 22. For a $10 ticket ($12.50 on weekends), art lovers will get to judge what the institute describes as "the finest paintings from every period of Monet's career-flowers and gardens, bridges and cathedrals, sunrises and sunsets, poplars and water lilies, boating scenes and seascapes."

But for those in the crowds, expected to top 500,000 for the four-month run, who have personally moved anything valuable anywhere, other nagging thoughts arise. How do you wrap these things? Who picks up the tab if they get nicked? How many nails do you use to hang the really heavy ones?

When it comes to the big Monet show, nothing has been a minor consideration for institute staffers, who have worked, in some cases, for five years to bring together the 159 works from 66 institutions and 36 private collectors, as far afield as Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Jerusalem.

Insurance was a major concern. Art Institute officials declined to give total figures for insurance costs, but credited the National Endowment for the Arts' Federal Indemnity Program for picking up a major portion ($950,000) for transport and exhibition of the paintings.

Some works rarely travel. Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" has left the Louvre only once, lent to a Tokyo museum in 1974 by President Georges Pompidou as a goodwill gesture to the people of Japan.

Michelangelo's "Pieta" made a rare visit to New York in 1964 for the World's Fair.

"My problem was to select the works we wanted to borrow, then persuade the owners that this project was worthy of their participation," began Charles Stuckey, the museum's curator of 20th Century painting and sculpture. "I've been doing blockbusters for 20 years now. Far and away, the response from lenders to this one was unusual, most positive."

Picking through Monet's roughly 2,000 known works, Stuckey managed to get "about 90 percent" of what he wanted, he said.

Other staffers, he went on, worried about "how do you get all these paintings to the same place at the same time?" Shippers, he added, "can't put too much art in any one shipment, or the insurance risk gets too large. Then there is the physical consistency of paint on canvas. Vibrating can dislodge paint from the surface. Cases are designed with layers, mufflers and baffles to cut down shocks. You also have to figure what will fit in an aircraft cargo bay."

Anything higher than 10 feet won't fit on planes.

Depending on the owner's decisions, paintings arrive in casing that includes, among other protections, high-tech polyurethane foam, to seal in air and keep moisture levels constant. "That's how paintings get damaged," Stuckey noted.